Trump is the avatar of an American reformation, for he is destroying the dangerous Leftist edifice that has turned our constitutional government into a god.

Jacob Peter Gowy’s The Flight of Icarus (1635–1637)

A few quotations to begin. The first is from Charles Lipson, writing about Mueller’s sinking reputation (and I guarantee that my ellipses are honest):

Republicans add three more serious charges against Mueller. *** Another serious charge — deliberate distortion of evidence — comes from president’s former attorney, John Dowd. He has shown the Mueller report edited one of his phone calls to change its meaning. Dowd is apoplectic, calling the report a “fraud.” Others will join him if additional distortions, misrepresentations, and omissions are found.

Now that Mueller has ended his probe finding no election collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, 10 witnesses and targets of his sprawling, $35 million investigation agreed to speak with RealClearInvestigations because they are no longer in legal jeopardy. *** Their firsthand accounts pull back the curtain on the secret inner workings of the Mueller probe, revealing how the special counsel’s nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion. *** Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into “perjury traps” for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort.

Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have. They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can- in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives. And sometimes they can look at evidence and facts through a biased prism that they themselves don’t realize.

I’ll add a tidbit of my own, something that’s purely anecdotal, so you’ll just have to take my word for it: In my many decades as a lawyer, I’ve faced off against a lot of opposing attorneys. Most were just doing their jobs, more or less aggressively or effectively. Some, though, were deliberately dishonest. As far as they were concerned, the rules did not apply to them. Without exception, these unethical lawyers graduated from Ivy League law schools in the years after 1984. [Read more…]